A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Spatial Constructions

There is an important connection between human cognition and language structure.Cognitive linguistics based on experiential philosophy holds that human experience is the basis of forming concepts and language systems.Guided by the cognitive construction grammar and relevant theories on cognitive semantics,this thesis makes a contrastive study on the basic language structure in Chinese and English by taking the constructions on spatial relations in Chinese and English as the research objects and tries to find out the causes of the difference from the perspective of spatial concept and metaphorical thinking.On the basis of previous studies,this paper mainly discusses the following two questions:(1)What are the differences in Chinese xia Construction and its English counterparts.(2)What are the cognitive mechanisms that lead to those differences.From a cross-linguistic perspective,it can be found that conceptual structure of space is an important basis for the constructions of language.In both Chinese and English,some basic syntactic constructions can form a prototype category,among which the typical members are the spatial constructions based on concepts of space,and atypical members of the category are formed through metaphor;Different ways of constructing grammatical constructions exist in Chinese and English.Symbolism is the main mean in Chinese and because of this,Chinese grammatical construction is implicit and lacks formal markers.English takes conventionality and logicality as the main means,and its grammatical construction is logic and explicit in form.Based on the language materials from BCC and COCA,this study examines the differences between spatial orientation relations in Chinese and English from the perspective of construction grammar.It is helpful for language learners to better understand the differences of sentence patterns from the cross-linguistic point of view,so as to promote foreign language teaching,second language acquisition,teaching Chinese as a foreign language,English-Chinese translation and dictionary compilation.It has certain guiding and practical significance.